Wireless networks have gained popularity in recent years as the onset of cellphones has led to ever increasing computing capability in the form of a hand-held or highly portable personal wireless device. So-called WiFi and newer WiMax capabilities provide wireless routing and throughput at transmission rates once achievable only by wired connections. Newer wireless mobile devices provide capabilities of email, media playback, and web browsing formerly only available in wired devices. As popularity of personal mobile devices increases, developers continue to produce increasingly bandwidth-hungry applications. Thus, the resulting user demand triggers an industry response resulting in increasing per-user bandwidth consumption. The underlying network infrastructure supporting this wireless demand therefore continues to be pushed to transport additional bandwidth for supporting the user base.
Wireless networks strive to provide performance similar to that of wired networks, and tend to be focused on individual consumer needs, such as email, voice calls, Internet browsing, and other computational activities that appeal to ad-hoc and spontaneous needs of an individual user, as opposed to regular and predictable business and industrial uses that often require additional and more predictable bandwidth. Conventional wired networks adapted to the introduction of WiFi according to IEEE 802.11b/g, and wireless operation was typically viewed as an add-on to conventional networks. Thus, network administrators addressed the novel technology by adding a few wireless routers as appendages to the wired infrastructure. However, the proliferation of WiFi enabled devices, and more recently WiMax based communications, has led to increasing use of wireless networks even in corporate environments. Accordingly, modern network management recognizes both wired and wireless operations in a unified switch, as opposed to conventional wired network management that addressed wireless operations as a separate tangential aspect in a separate wireless router or as a separate wireless endpoint.